Owen should read his own book, in my opinion, and study to have a greater understanding of the “political theory” of Kendall/Strauss. Mr. Owen takes too much at “face value,” seeing it through the eyes of a “historian,” and not applying a political theory analysis, as Kendall would have called for in assessing foreign leaders and governments, in my opinion. That’s the one thing I agree with Kendall/Strauss on, though I vigorously oppose the “particular” political theory they support, with its “genealogy” to Hobbes and Machiavelli, as Hamilton introduced to American political thought by way of his disproportionate contributions to the Federalist Papers. And by way of Leo Strauss, to Carl Schmitt, as Peter Thiel promulgates favorably now in the candidates he supports, as a follow-up to his Stanford paper which I’ve shared in the past (in my opinion, backed by evidence of the paper itself. Incidentally, one doesn’t need to have a Ph.D. and a position in a college history department to act in the capacity of a historian. In my own case, in addition to my B.A. in History in which I focused on study of the USSR and China, and my J.D., and having been tasked by the Courts to provide extensive historical research on issues I’ve written on here (Andrew Jackson, legal theory, to include “fascist legal theory,” Constitutional history, etc.), I received a M.A. in Politics from the New School in 2018, which is in the tradition of interdisciplinary study of history and political a theory, and the program that Hannah Arendt, and Leo Strauss, had a lot to do with designing, with my primary focus on political theory, in that tradition. Not as “Political Science,” a distinction which I won’t explain here, but one more point of agreement I have with Kendall, and Strauss. That’s the “input,” the study of political theory as necessary to understand the motivation of political actors. It’s the “output” that I so vigorously disagree with Strauss, Kendall, and all the other Straussians, because in their “theory,” they misinterpret/reinvent “history” to suit their political purposes of creating a "culture” of militarism, and Caesarism (guided “democracy,” guided by ideologists like Kendall, and Strauss), which in the U.S., as Kendall claimed it did for Rousseau, and others in the Straussian “vein,” “secret writing” was required. As Kendall explicitly laid out what “democracy” meant for Rousseau, and himself, as well as having Leo Strauss’s enthusiastic concurrence, in his 1966 Introduction of his translation of Rousseau’s “Government in Poland,” not long before he died. This is the “kind” of “democracy” Kendall advocated, in all respects, what J.L. Talmon identified as “Totalitarian Democracy:” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian_democracy#:~:text=Totalitarian%20democracy%20is%20a%20term,decision%2Dmaking%20process%20of%20the |
Attachment:
The Government of Poland-2.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
Attachment:
J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Introduction (1952).pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
BLUF (Talmon): "The second vital difference between the two types of totalitarianism is to be found in their divergent conceptions of human nature. The Left proclaims the essential goodness and perfectibility of human nature. The Right declares man to be weak and corrupt. Both may preach the necessity of coercion. The Right teaches the necessity of force as a permanent way of maintaining order among poor and unruly creatures, and training them to act in a manner alien to their mediocre nature." Attached also is “The Nature of Psychological Warfare,” allegedly mostly written by Kendall, which in its “place,” there is no problem in writing that in the position (with “ORO") he was in, and at the tail-end of the Korean War. But it is a critical document in the formation of the “Conservative Movement’s” "domestic war theory,” as necessary to be directed toward the U.S. population in maneuvering the U.S. into a Perpetual Warfare State, serving the interests of the “Military Industrial Complex,” just as Hans Speier, a German native and very well educated and knowledgeable individual, was hired by the Rand Corporation a little earlier as a Psychological Warfare expert, to do the same on behalf of the Military industrial Complex. There is more to say of how Kendall advocated a “politicized” analysis for intelligence analysts at the CIA and other agencies, in opposition to Sherman Kent’s call for “objectivity” for intelligence product going to decision makers, which Kent won in the short term, as Owen writes. In the “long term,” Kendall’s call for “politicized” intelligence product going to decision makers prevailed, as we saw with the Iraq War of 2003. But given the harshness of Kendall’s and the other CIA Psychological Warfare expert, James Burnham’s, criticism of the CIA and the Eisenhower administration, it doesn’t take a great imagination to see, that with Bill Casey and Bill Buckley, that National Review magazine was set up as an opposing “influence operation,” one calling incessantly for “rollback,” versus the “moderates” calling for “Containment,” and demanding even more aggression from the CIA and DOD than what they were already doing, and implanting those ideas into a “Conservative Movement,” hyper-militaristic, ideology, as expressed by Kendall in the preface to Owen’s biography of him (JFRI). This “copy and paste” from a pdf doesn’t always come through clear so look to the attached file for a better view. DEDICATION To Leo Strauss, the colleague and teacher under whom, Willmoore often said, he put himself to school again to learn what the ancients and the moderns have to teach us. NELLIE KENDALL Excerpt (starting at the middle of xxvii) Not more than that, if only because, first, the Poland as a Vel).ture in "secret writing" is inseparable from The Social Contract, so that one must constantly weave back and forth between the earlier work and the later one in order to fully understand either of the books and, second, because I must patU>eto say a word about certain favorite techniques which Rousseau uses when he wishes to get across, to the careful reader for whom he is really writing, a point which he would pref er to be "lost" on most readers. These are nof the tech.,. niques that Leo Strauss has ascribed to Machiavelli and Locke· they cannot be, because Rousseau resorts to them for a reaso~ entirely different from that of Machiavelli or Locke. Machiavelli and Locke conceal their meaning because, to use Professor Strauss' terms, they are "cautious" men, who wish to say "sl,10cking" things without bringing upon themselves the ~onsequences of a reputation for entertaining "shocking" behe~ s. Rousseau, by contrast, is by no means a cautious writer in that sense. Locke, for instance, would have regarded him as bold to the point of rashness; w.itness, for example, Rousseau's repeated open challenge to the prevailing religious orthodoxy of his day. Rousseau-so at least this critic has come to believe after m,any years of poring over his writings-resorts to "secret writing" for a single and intimately personal reason, namely, to distract attention from any idea or proposal that might lay him open to ridicule, or that, in his own view, was not worth pressing upon his contemporaries (whom he had written off as hopeless), but was worth handing along to posterity. Put otherwise: More than any other political philosopher one can name, !Dore ',!v~t I tht_nk, th:in.~. . u . . . s convinc 0 e~ ~at~:~~: and that his were the answers that mankind would one day be driven to adopt. But, he was equally convinced that his "answers" were without relevance to the age in which he lived (unless, perhaps, in Geneva and Corsica and, just possibly, in Poland); and, at the same time, proud and sensitive man that Rousseau was, he was quite unwilling to accept, much less invite, a reputation for impracticality, or absurdity, or "utopianism." When, therefore, we find him concealing something-as, on the record, he successfully concealed what a careful reading will show to be the major proposal he had to make as a political philosopher-the first thing we notice is that it is something that his contemporaries would have deemed too foolish to be worth discussing, that is, the notion of giving up the large nation state for another form of polity. Let me come a little closer to the point by spelling out that last remark. The central theme of The Social Contract, the idea that, now in one form and now in another, turns up again and again in the course of the argument, is the idea that man can be "moral" and "free" only in a self-contained community small enough to enable the citizens to meet and deliberate together in an assembly; that only in such a community are man's "chains," his "bondage," capable of being "justified," because only in such a community is it possible for the citizens to arrive at a "general will"; that any other form of political organization, above all the territorially extensive modern state, is ipso facto "illegitimate." That idea, along with the unavoidable implication that man, if he had his senses about him, would write off the modern state as an intolerable tyranny, fairly cries up at you out of the book-if you are prepared to take notice of it and treat it seriously. How explain the fact, thep, that not one critic in a hundred who has written on RQusseau attributes that idea to The Social Contract as its ce~tral teaching, and that even,the one critic who does is well nigh certain to sweep it aside as an "anachronism" on Rousseau's part,-well nigh certain, that is to say, not to take it seriously. How explain the fact that though the number of critics who have "refuted" The Social Contract is legion, no critic cpmes to mind who has come to grips with that idea, and torn it to-pieces? The only possible answer, I think, is that Rous-, seau has, with breath-taking artistry, so handled the idea that, in the very act of insisting upon it, he leads the reader's attention ,away from it, and .sees to it that it will go unnoticed-as, on.t•h e record (I repeat), it for the most part has. One of Rousseau's techniques for concealing something, then, is that of making it simultaneously obvious and (for most readers) h\yisible. In The Government of Poland Rousseau continues his attack on the typical form of the modern political regime, but he' does so now in order to call for a return to what he conceives to be ancient virtue rather than to extemporize the conditions necessary for the formation of the "general will." In a .s~nse, the Poland can be read as perhaps the last and certainly one of the most significant rehearsals of a theme that had absorbed French and English writers throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The prevailing theme of the work is that of "Ancients vs. Moderns," and the book is characterized by Rousseau's continual confrontation of modern political and cultural practice with what he considers to he the superior modes and orders of Rome, Sparta, and Israel. He would have the Poles "establish a republic in their own hearts" that would effectively set them apart from their European contemporaries and would restore to them a sense of the healthier bonds of association enjoyed by the ancient polities. As he says, the key problem of devising a constitution for Poland (and, should we not infer, the central problem in founding an appropriate regime for any of the modern peoples?) .~he_ ~s}s_2 .L!~ising contemporary man "to the pitch of the souls of the an- ~,, 7 'The Poland, then, 'can be taken as ·a kind of provi.!. s~onal model for_'the grander program of refounding the .o11anon- state along Imes prestribed, by the study ohhe ancienrsr Poland, according to Rousseau, is confronted with ,the opportu~ty of form_ing for a large booy of people dispersed ?ver a wide_ area a•g?ve.tnment that ma:y yet avoid the seemmgly chrome despotism of other modem states. But this earl be ·accomplished' only by mak~ng the Poles into a tightly clo~ed society with• respect to the influence of other -:European· regimes; and, above all, it can 'Only b~ accomplished if the Poles are made to become so dependent" upon one another' fhat the:y. co~e to fee~ they cannot exist apart from their unique pohudtl hfe. In this way the Polish citizen can be imbuedwith a sense of piety towards his native land and be made 'to feel a hea1thy repugnance for the cosmopolitan habits of the idegenerate modem European. The Rousseau of the Poland seems simply to ide~tify patriotism witli virtue; consequently, he feel_st hat. to ra~s~t he so~ls of Polish citizens t? die dignity of, a~cien_t virtu~ 1t 1s•~ffic~ent merely to diminish personal individuality ~)'.'1 rtl:ulcat1ngm the Poles an all-consuming devotion to the pohttcal order. Furthermore, it is Rousseau's contentfon that freedom is intimately connected with the kind of virtue ~e is describing in the Poland; and thus, somehow, true•Iiberty 1s to be achieved only through the form of total government ; which he is proposing. \ Ro~sseau indeed is proposing in the Poland a radically ( parado~1cal, though bY: no means a totally new notion of freedom. Liberty, he says, ts a food for strong stomachs; and it can only be :lttaih'ed,,as the result of, a prior act of establishihg rather h'arsh and· extensive restraints: f . I laugh at . those debased peoples that let themselves be stirred up by agitators, and dare to speak of liberty without so much_ as having the idea of it; with their hearts still heavy with t?e vice~ of slaves, they imagine that they have only -to be mutmuous m order to be free. Proud, sacred liberty! If they bur knew 7 III, pages 11-12. (WK transl.) her, those wretched men; if they but understood the price at which s6~ is won and held; if they but realized that her laws are stern .as the tyrant's yoke is never hard, their sickly souls, the slaves ,of passions that would have to be hauled out by the roots, would fear liberty a hundred times as much as they fear servitude. They would flee her in terror, as they would a burden about to crush them,s What needs to be restrained so that liberty may flourish are, first of all, those selfish and private attachments of modern man that cause division in society. More specifically, it is above all the passion of acquisitiveness, which must be rooted out .from the hearts of men and replaced by the desire for honor: Honor in turn is a monopoly of the state; Rousseau would .deny all avenues to glory except those that lead to the s~rvice of the state. The Poles should follow the example of the Romans and spurn all luxurious acquisitions as being inherently- degrading; they should discourage commerce with other countries and foster a ,frugal but self-sufficing agrarian economyL; The trouble with modern European man, as Rousseau insists throughout the Poland, is that the failure of contemporary legisliitors to provide him with institutions that promote a fully politicized existence leaves him free to pursue-indeed forces him to pursue-the divisive ends dictated by private in" terests. In view of this increasingly desperate situation, the only way to prepare man for good legislation is by a prior founding of unique "national institutions" that will so fill up •the horizon of his interests that he will have no opportunity for creating private ends. As for the nature of Rousseau's envisaged ethos, he seems to say that almost anything will do as long as it serves to promote a distinctively national character. You must maintain or reviv.e ( as the case may be) your ancient customs and introduce suitable new ones that will also be purely Polish. Let these new customs be neither here nor there as far as good and bad are concerned; let them even have their 8 VI, pages 29-30. (WK transl.) bad points; they would, un_less bad in princip{e, still afford this advantage: they w~uld endear Poland to its citizens, and develop in them an instinctive distaste for mingling with the peoples of other countries.II It becomes more and more clear as one reads the Poland that Rousseau identifies the viciousness of the moderns with a certain randomness in the pattern of their lives. His notion of virtue, then, involves simply the replacement of "random man" with the kind of person whose life is ordered by some consistent purpose. 'Fhis kind of person is the citizen or the com- • pletely public man; and it is the business of the state, or, more properly, it is the business of the founder of the state to see to it that the citizen passes every waking moment within institutionSJthat will insure his constant attention to public affairs. To put it another way, for Rousseau the random life is slavery because it is constantly subject to the vicissitudes of the moinent, whereas even under the most authoritarian regime the genuine citizen enjoys a superior freedom by virtue of his sense of purpose. Apart from being grounded in an intense piety toward the fatherland, Rousseau's notion 6f virtue is almost without content. Throughout the .Poland he holds up the example of Sparta as the ancient regime most worthy to be emulated for the hardihood and simplicity of its citizens, but most of all for the unparalleled devotion to the state which was exemplified in its heroes from the ,time of Lycurgus onwards. End Concluding paragraph: The Government of Poland acquires a further dimension of importance when we read it in the context of democratic ,theory, since along with The Federalist it is possibly the first a~tempt by a political theorist of great standing to apply prin- ;<;iples of democratic theory to a concrete political regime. Thus the Poland not only gives us a new perspective, as I have trie,d to show, on some of the more puzzling features of Rous~ eau's earlier political thought; it also provides us with a model for representative government which, because it is in many ways opposed to the prevailing Publian version, enables us to better understand both the virtues and the limitations of our current practices. To return to the promise implicit in the title o( this Introduction, The Government of Poland should be read both as a clarification and a criticism of the political teaching of The Social Contract and as a comprehensive attempt to deal with those central problems of democratic theory that have continued to exercise our minds to this day. Willmoore Kendall University of Dallas ( August, 1966
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